Shape‑based reconstruction of dynamic fluorescent yield with a level set method

Abstract

Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) [1] is a promising imaging technique that reveals the distributions of fluorescent agents within small animals in vivo. As an optical tomographic imaging technique, FMT has advantages of low cost, non-ionizing radia-tion and high sensitivity [2]. These merits lead to the popularity of the studies of FMT that not only observe static distribution of fluorescent markers [3] but also investigate metabolic process of drugs [4]. Compared with the static distribution, metabolic char-acteristics can provide additional information, which is important for drug development and tumor studies. At present, two kinds of methods are used in the reconstruction of dynamic FMT. The first one is to directly apply the reconstruction methods for static FMT to deal with dynamic cases [4, 5]. However, these methods are incapable of recov-ering the metabolic information within the data acquisition time and perform poorly especially when the fluorophore concentrations vary rapidly [6], because they only Background: Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) is an optical imaging tech-nique that reveals biological processes within small animals through non-invasivel